HP and its shareholders, partners and customers should be enjoying at least
a small sigh of relief, too. The decision announced Dec. 9 is clearly
the best one for all of them.

The Only Decision to Make, After All
On second thought, let's reframe that statement: It was the only decision for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based IT giant to make in this
embarrassing situation. Going open source amounts to donating used but
still presentable apparel or books to the thrift store. But you also can
earn a lot of good will in this manner-not to mention a tax break.
In HP's estimation, handing it over to the community way outranks webOS
continuing as a money-losing project inside the company. The third
option-decapitating the division altogether-would have been clear
admittance that HP's $1.2 billion investment in buying Palm in April
2010 was a monstrous strategic error. We already know that, but
stockholders-and potential stockholders-don't particularly like
that type of public reiteration.
HP hasn't told the entire story about this move yet because at this
time it won't say whether webOS will remain a division within the
company or whether it will be spun off as an independent entity-like Hadoop's development team went out from Yahoo in the form of Hortonworks earlier this year.
All HP will say on the record now is that "the goal of the project is to
accelerate the open development of the webOS platform" and that "HP
will be an active participant and investor in the project." Not much
meat on those bones, but as time goes on, we can expect to hear more
about how much time, staff and money HP will really put into webOS.
Either way HP decides to move, webOS becoming a nonprofit-status entity
will serve as a tax break for HP. It's now up to the lawyers as to which
of two scenarios will provide the better tax shelter: a one-time
spinoff write-off or a continuing in-house write-off.
That's the good news for HP, which also will gain legitimate plaudits
from the software development community in general for being so
"generous" with its expensive code.
'Potentially Significant Strategic Move'
"This is potentially a significant strategic move by HP, but only if
done right," Clint Oram, chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of SugarCRM, told eWEEK.
"Sprinkling open-source pixie dust on a technology doesn't magically
make it better. There are some significant next steps ahead of HP in
terms of choosing the right license and more importantly building a
community of developers and users."
Markus Rex, former senior vice president and general manager in charge
of SUSE Linux at Novell and CTO of the Linux Foundation, told eWEEK, "It is always great news to see a project released as open source,
especially if it already had a head start by being used in production on
thousands of machines.
"The announcement sure says all the 'right things,' so if this pans out
that way, it'll be a good thing. [It's a] great opportunity to bring Linux- and
open-source-based mobile operating systems closer together and join
forces in a unified way."
The word is that HP may be developing a webOS tablet PC for 2013
release, hoping against hope that the magic from Apple's iPad and the
leading Android devices will have worn off by then. Then again, floating
the idea of a new webOS-powered tablet could simply be a marketing ploy to
generate interest in the open-source mobile app development community.
A final thought on all of this: Who will want to develop software for an
operating system that is so far behind iOS, Android and BlackBerry
that it can barely see their taillights in the distance? HP will have to
be the one doing the lobbying to the community-whether or not webOS goes
independent at some point-and it's unknown how much capital the
company will want to invest. After all, HP is primarily a server,
storage, printer and services business.
So the posturing has begun. But it appears that the most interesting news on this topic has yet to be reported.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz